AFTERWORD

Nice to meet you all. My name is Tsutomu Sato. Thank you very much for reading this book.

The Irregular at Magic High School is my debut work, corrected and revised from the serial version I began putting up on an Internet novel submission site in October 2008. Receiving the good fortune to publish something like this that I wrote purely for fun began with a single e-mail from the website’s administrator.

It was a forward of an e-mail from ASCII Media Works, and in it was an invitation—a request for a meeting to discuss publication.

I honestly doubted my own eyes.

Novels are my biggest hobby. I love both writing and reading them for pleasure. So I had known before that I would like to reveal my works as a novelist in the arena of physical books. Once, as a side thing from my dead-end salaryman job, I submitted a novel I’d written in my free time to a publisher’s new author award contest. But I thought to myself—this The Irregular at Magic High School was the sort of thing that would only be accepted as an amateur work on the free Internet. Wasn’t it a bit adventurous for a big-name publishing company to handle?

Those were the things I was thinking—it would never work.

In reality, the publication company I’m referring to was ASCII Media Works, and it was for the Sixteenth Dengeki Novel Award, but the work I submitted was rejected outright. If you’ll forgive me for sounding like a poor loser, I had to compress the work’s contents by 50 percent to meet the application guidelines. Even I felt that there were some issues inherent in doing that, so I wasn’t surprised when it was rejected. The world isn’t that nice—that was one of the few useful teachings I had gotten during my life as a salaryman.

But occasionally, in the course of someone’s life, some unexpectedly nice things will happen. After a normal greeting and a bit of small talk, someone from the Dengeki Bunko editing division who happened to see my work (it may not be necessary to hide their name, but following custom (?), I’ll refer to them as M) asked me if I was Mr. XXXX who had written XXXX, and this deeply surprised me. The work I had submitted to the Dengeki Novel Award had the same settings as that one, but it leaned in a different direction as a sci-fi novel, and my pen name was an English name written in Japanese with phonetically similar kanji characters. M happened to have remembered my rejected work, so when they chanced across this work, which was on the Internet, their antennae perked up—hadn’t they seen settings like this before? And that was apparently why he’d gotten in touch with me.

M seemed to have hesitations at making something that was free into something that was paid, and when I first met him, he was quite worried about what the Internet readers would think. I had thought about the same thing in the past, too. But the long economic recession and the downturn of companies resulted in limitations on overtime hours and an adverse wind blowing through the salaryman world. I felt that I’d need to find a side job if things kept on this way, or I’d have it tough. But if I did that, I wouldn’t have any time to write novels. I can’t say I hadn’t been hoping to continue this work.

The world really isn’t that easy, but occasionally something that is—a stroke of luck—is waiting for you. And of course, this luck is thanks to M, who got in touch with me to make this happen, as well as the admins of the “Let’s Be a Novelist” website, who helped me in all sorts of ways even after it was decided—and above all, it’s thanks to everyone who supported this work. I’d like to borrow this space to extend my deepest gratitude to you.

I’d also like to thank Mr. Kawahara, who gave more words of recommendation on my behalf than I deserved; Ms. Ishida, the illustrator, who gave this work much-needed added value; Mr. Stone, who did the mechanical designs; Ms. Suenaga, who did the color coordination; and all the staff who were involved with this book.

And above all, a deep, heartfelt thanks goes to the fortune that allowed me to deliver this book into your hands. I will work my hardest to ensure that this fortune doesn’t end here, and that I can continue to deliver this work to you in future volumes.

Tsutomu Sato